What is your MAT strategy?

Are you a part of a Federation, Academy or a Trust? Do you work together towards a common IT strategy? Do you have an IT strategy?

Working together as part of a federation, academy or trust can save schools time and money by making improving efficiency and helping those ever tightening school budgets.

Save Time and Money

SWGfL works with MATs (Multi Academy Trusts) across the South West to provide safe, secure, and affordable connectivity. We know that not all MATs want the same things, whether it’s a shared network, or hosted SIMS, remote access or servers in the cloud, not everyone has the same IT vision, so we work with you to help you set up your own bespoke network.

When it comes to IT, before you can make any plans, you need a reliable internet connection. You need to trust that it is safe, secure and affordable. You need to know it won’t be bought down by a rogue DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack or hacked by a brilliant, but disgruntled student.

If your vision is to move to the cloud, you need to ensure your connection is robust enough and you have the required bandwidth available to achieve your goal. At SWGfL we have a dedicated SIS (Schools Internet Service) team who work closely with customers to help understand their vision and ensure they have the right foundations in place.

A Successful Strategy

Having the right IT strategy in place, not only impacts the smooth running of your MAT, but will enhance teaching and learning. For any strategy to be successful, you need to ensure everyone understands and accepts it. Change is hard enough, but winning everyone over is another challenge.

If the strategy is too technical for everyone to understand you won’t get the support of all your sites and you’re already starting an uphill battle. That said, it does need to be challenging in order to inspire and have meaning. When you get it right you inspire creativity, excitement, and collaboration allowing everyone to grow together.

SWGfL has an established track record of network management and online safety and helping schools achieve their strategy -. From your own Virtual Private Network (VPN) to fully hosted cloud support, our services are designed with schools in mind. With our technology, SWGfL has the capability to deliver real IT savings across MATs and have delivered genuine cloud transformation within schools.

Designed for Education

SWGfL’s service is fully managed, designed for education and includes the internet connection. Beyond that we provide a remotely managed high performance router configured to your requirements:

managed IP addresses and DNS

intrusion prevention

managed firewall services

DDoS (Distributed denial of Service) protection

Our cloud based industry standard redundant firewalls protect all network services and you can customise the rules without the additional overheads of having to manage local devices.

Being cloud hosted means we can provide a range of extra connectivity services to MATs at no extra cost. We can connect all the schools to each other via a VPN without the need to place further equipment on site. RM’s Safetynet Plus filtering can also be set up, controlled and reported on from the MAT level.

World Leader in Online Child Safety

In addition to our connectivity services, our customers can feel safe in the knowledge that SWGfL is a world leader in online child safety, a founding member of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety, an advisor to governments, and one of three partners in the UK Safer Internet Centre.

We produce award-winning resources to better safeguard young people online. We provide staff, pupil and parent training as well as the Professionals Online Safety Helpline. We have a variety of award winning tools available for your schools to help keep your pupils and your staff safe.

To discuss your IT strategy and find out how SWGfL can offer your MAT true savings, get in touch with the SIS team today. Call: 0345 601 3203 or contact us via email.